When a Baton Rouge Boy Scout leader slipped out of the state in the summer of 1986, he didn't bother with a goodbye to Robert Walker, a Scout who had, for a time, considered him a father figure. For the next 26 years, Walker wondered what happened to the man.

He had questions for him: about the vodka parties they'd had when he was 14, about the pornography they'd watched together, about a night in the backseat of a van when he says he pretended to sleep while his Scoutmaster fondled him.

He told no one. And while he kept his secret, the Scouts were keeping one, too.

For all those years, his former Scoutmaster's name was listed among the Boy Scouts of America's "perversion files" -- a vast, long-hidden collection of documents chronicling suspected child molesters cast out of the Scouts over the past six decades.

Months after that night in the van on the way home from a camping trip, another teenage boy reported that the same Scoutmaster had fondled him, too, Walker learned.

The troop leader, an offshore oil worker, was banished from the Scouts and quietly returned to his home state of Illinois.

But the incident was never reported to police.

Many of the Louisiana files now available resemble that of Walker's former leader: the Boy Scouts learned of the suspected abuse, drove the accused offender from their ranks but failed to report the allegation to law enforcement. If such inaction were to happen today, it would be considered a felony under Louisiana's mandatory reporting laws, which require people in certain professions to immediately alert law enforcement to allegations or evidence of abuse.

An investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that, across the country, the Scouts' punting of such serious abuse allegations mirrored that of the Catholic Church, which protected dozens of pedophile priests to save its good name.

The Boy Scouts' national president, Wayne Perry, issued an apology the day after more than 1,200 of the files were released by an Oregon attorney under court order.

"There have been instances where people misused their positions in Scouting to abuse children, and in certain cases, our response to these incidents and our efforts to protect youth were plainly insufficient, inappropriate, or wrong," Perry wrote the Los Angeles Times. "Where those involved in Scouting failed to protect, or worse, inflicted harm on children, we extend our deepest and sincere apologies to victims and their families."

Some of the available Louisiana files reveal that the Scouts actively sought to keep alleged abuse a secret.

In the summer of 1965, a mother told the Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Office that a troop leader had raped one of her sons, and she suspected he had molested the boy's two brothers. Days later, the 31-year-old Scoutmaster sat down with two deputies and admitted to molesting nearly a half-dozen Scouts, wooed with vodka, pornography and color television.

He was banished from the Scouts and run out of the parish, but no charges were ever filed -- admittedly to protect the organization's wholesome reputation.

"... We are indeed sorry that scouting was involved," the region's Scout Executive wrote to the national office of the Boy Scouts of America eight days later. "This subject and the Scouts were not prosecuted to save the name of Scouting."

California-based attorney Tim Kosnoff, who's sued the Boy Scouts more than 100 times and has studied the documents for decades, was struck by how many of the Louisiana cases were first reported to the Scouts, who then failed to turn them over to law enforcement.

"They've taken this great concept of scouting that can help so many kids and they have perverted," he said, "because they were so worried about their own image instead of being worried about the boys they were trying to help."

None of the Louisiana files available indicate that the Scouts, on their own, picked up the phone and called the police. Nor do most show any significant internal investigation to determine if the leaders they were banning had abused other children. And Walker said that, for him, that would have made all the difference.

His 26 years since have included two suicide attempts, a failed marriage, and an adulthood of self-doubt and self-blame that he attributes, in part, to the abuse he claims he suffered at the hands of his Scoutmaster.

"He made me feel special; he was like a father. To a certain extent there was almost a love involved," he says now. "So I felt like maybe I had done something to deserve this. Maybe I asked for this and it was my fault."

Walker had been an awkward teenager, with few friends and distant parents, and the Scoutmaster had been the only adult to take an active interest in him. He felt he had no one else to turn to.

"If adults would have told me he had done this to other boys, that it wasn't just me, if the police were contacted, it would have totally changed everything," Walker says now. "It would have totally changed my life."

"Normal Rockwell painted pictures of Boy Scouts"

A council Scout Executive named William Lucas wrote the letter that added Walker's Scoutmaster to the perversion files.

"I talked with [him] at some length and am convinced in my own mind that he should not be permitted to continue his registration with the Boy Scouts of America," Lucas wrote.

Lucas, now retired after 42 years with the Scouts, said he did not recall Walker or his troop leader by name, and he did not want to be sent the file or a photograph to review.

"I'm sorry, I don't remember. I don't recall anything about it," he said. "I don't want to get involved with something that happened 25 years ago."

Letters like the one he wrote in 1986, from regional Scout Executives across the country, prompted the placement of thousands of men, and a handful of women, into the perversion files.

Kosnoff estimates that a new file entry was created, on average, every two days.

The files, kept at the organization's Texas headquarters, were meant to keep dangerous predators and other undesirables away from Scouts. And much of the time, they worked to that end.

Many of the Louisiana cases, including Walker's troop leader, later tried again to volunteer for the Scouts and were turned away when their names turned up on the list.

Lucas said they followed the laws of the time -- they reported allegations of abuse to authorities when the law required them to.

The National Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act became law in 1965, and each state has since refined its own laws at unequal paces and with differing definitions of a mandatory report. A category that would explicitly cover the Scouts was not added to the Louisiana law until this year.

"This kind of thing happened," Lucas said. "But we always did whatever we could to be sure the person was removed from the program, to be sure that the boys would be as safe as possible."

Even critics concede that the Boy Scouts could have never kept predators out. Their failure was instead protecting their virtuous reputation more vigilantly than they protected children.

Kelly Clark, the Oregon attorney who won a $20 million verdict against the Scouts, has another pending lawsuit against them. A man was run out of Scouting on suspicion of child molestation and, a decade later, abused another child in a church. Had the Scouts called the police, the lawsuit argues, that man might have been locked up and thus been unable to hurt the other child 10 years later.

"This is a sacred American institution. This is a corporation chartered by Congress. Normal Rockwell painted pictures of Boy Scouts," Clark said. "There's an intuitive knee-jerk reaction to protect the organization instead of trying to protect the kid."

Clark's firm made more than 1,200 of the files public last month after the Oregon Supreme Court ordered their release at the request of several news organizations. The Los Angeles Times added those to a database of almost 5,000 other files dated between 1947 and 2005, many of which were obtained by Kosnoff in various lawsuits over the years.

Lawyers continue to battle the Scouts for more of the most current files, from the 1990s and 2000s, that have been used as evidence in lawsuits but remain protected from public disclosure by court order. An unknown number of additional files have been destroyed by the Scouts over the decades.

Of the 72 known Louisiana cases, files are currently available for 39.

Two of them detail men exiled on suspicion of mere homosexuality. Openly gay people are barred from membership in Scouting, as are atheists and agnostics. A third file involved a woman investigated for beating her 8-year-old child.

The other 36 cases involved allegations of child sexual abuse.

In half of them, the Boy Scouts were responding to criminal charges already filed, either by angry parents or organizations outside of the Scouts. They include the infamous eastern New Orleans Boy Scouts sex scandal of 1976. Troop 137 was founded solely to recruit impressionable boys from broken homes to be used as sex slaves. Seventeen men were arrested in all, including the three troop leaders found in the files, and a long list of their clientele.

It was one of the first major blows to the Scouts' reputation.

The remaining files are cases in which the incidents were reported first to the Boy Scouts.

In a 1965 case in Springhill, a Scout Executive assured the national office that an abusive Scoutmaster had been run out of the state and into Alabama, and nobody was the wiser.

"The incident has been kept quiet to the extent that only three adult troop [leaders] and the pastor are aware of it," he crowed. "... The community nor the Scouters of Springhill are aware of the problem."

Another, dated 1973, details a Scoutmaster caught molesting boys between 12 and 15 years old. The Scoutmaster, who was also a state trooper, was allowed to leave the Scouts and resign from the State Police.

A letter written on State Police letterhead with the signature redacted said the trooper's quiet resignation "saved the division the embarrassment of a civil service hearing."

The Scout Executive seconded that relief in a letter to the national office: "There have been no legal accusations made or public hearings involved in any way, and as you will note, the State Police avoided investigation by allowing the man to resign from his post."

The other Scoutmasters described in the files include a doctor, an organ tuner, a police sergeant and two deputies, foresters, teachers, students, a gas station manager and a housewife.

The latter was banned in 1988 for having an affair with a 16-year-old Scout in Morgan City. Her file notes that the incident was kept quiet, even from her husband and family.

Another man checked boys in a Monroe-based troop for chiggers and ticks, and purported to rub "medicine" on their genitals in 1987. Three others were expelled for a "sordid situation" involving young boys in New Orleans in 1966.

The Times-Picayune is not naming these Scoutmasters because they were never investigated or charged with a crime. Even the Scouts' critics accept that there are, undoubtedly, people listed in the files who were wrongfully accused.

Two men named in the files, contacted by phone, both denied having done what the files describe. But neither hold it against the Scouts.

"They did the only thing they could do at the time," said one, banned in 1989 when a mother reported that he'd touched her son. He said he still donates money to the Scouts.

But others explicitly confessed: In 1970, a Colorado Scoutmaster was accused of fondling three Scouts as they slept. He admitted "immoral relationships with boys" to the Scout Executive, and "detailed an incident with one boy when they shared sleeping gear on a hike."

And yet the police were not called. Instead, the Colorado Scout Executive wrote to the national office that the man had returned to his hometown of Napoleonville, and "so our hands are tied as far as proceeding further."

That Scoutmaster, Richard Gauthe, turned out to be the brother of Gilbert Gauthe, among the first pedophile priests to be prosecuted in the 1980s.

Richard Gauthe married a woman with three children in the late 1970s, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle. She later accused him of molesting all three. Gauthe was eventually imprisoned in Great Britain.

In another of the Boy Scouts' Louisiana files, dated 1983, a man accused of hosting underage booze parties and molesting boys was told he could stay on with the troop a while longer, then resign. His Scout Executive helped him come up with an excuse: he would tell the troop he was leaving "for the purpose of patching up his unhappy family situation."

A month later, the same man was caught with a teenage boy in his motel room. The Scout Executive submitted his name to the file, but still did not contact police.

Kosnoff called on the state's attorney general to investigate the old cases -- and to find out whether the Scouts' institutional secrecy allowed child molesters to get away with it.

"I think Louisiana can't look the other way," he said. "It's going to take the power and the resources of the state. It's too widespread, too big."

But the attorney general's office has so far declined, directing potential victims instead to their local district attorney.

"We will work with district attorneys, law enforcement and other states' attorneys general to maximize the resolution of these serious cases," the office said in a written statement.

"Systems are in place to protect our youth"

Child abusers in the Scouts are no longer treated so leniently, said Don Ellis, the Scout Executive and CEO of the Southeast Louisiana Council of the Boy Scouts of America, which serves 12,000 local kids.

"It's unfortunate that those things happened," he said. "But I assure you that in today's Boy Scouts of America, systems are in place to protect our youth to hopefully prevent what happened 30 or 40 years ago."

All volunteers must now submit to a criminal background check. There's an institution-wide "two-deep leadership" policy -- meaning no kid should ever be alone with a Scout leader.

And all volunteers and employees are trained on the policy for reporting suspected child abuse: If volunteers are given reason to suspect a child is being abused, they are to report it to Ellis, the Council Executive. Ellis then contacts the Boy Scouts' national Youth Protection office and is advised on how to proceed.

But Stacie LeBlanc with the New Orleans Children Advocacy Center said that Louisiana law mandates such suspicions to be immediately reported "out, not up."

Those required by law to report suspected child abuse -- which includes Boy Scout volunteers -- must ensure a report is made to law enforcement, not their supervisor.

She provided an example: A high school principal in Alexandria was once cited under the state's mandatory reporting law for waiting until the next day to report two students, one 17 and the other 14, caught having sex on the school's campus.

And there is a reason for that, she said. Jerry Sandusky's sexual depredations at Penn State were allowed to fester into a national scandal in large part because allegations were reported up the chain of command rather than to an agency with the capacity to do anything to stop it.

"It's an awful thing that children are sexually abused," LeBlanc said. "But the research clearly shows that it truly does more harm to the kids when the adults in their lives don't stand up and protect them."

In response to the Penn State imbroglio, the state of Louisiana toughened its mandatory reporting laws this year.

Several groups were added to the list of those beholden to report child abuse to law enforcement, including "organizational or youth activity providers," a category any Boy Scout volunteer would qualify under.

Failing to report suspected sexual abuse is now a felony in the state, rather than a misdemeanor, and those convicted can be fined up to $3,000 and jailed for three years.

The Children's Advocacy Center, which helped to craft the new mandatory reporting law, offers training for those it applies to: the clergy, teachers, bus drivers, social workers, nurses, doctors, camp counselors, coaches and dozens more.

"We'll never be able to protect our children if each and every adult doesn't step up and report and expose behaviors that they suspect are abusive," she said. "That's the only way we're going to end this epidemic."

For more information on the Children's Advocacy Center or child abuse prevention, visit nocac.net or call 504.894.5484.